Balakrishnan Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. He is a doctoral candidate in Cross-Cultural Musicology with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies and a Graduate Pedagogy Fellow at the University of California Santa Cruz. Bala’s work focuses on oral traditions of music across the Indian subcontinent, with an emphasis on the politics of spirituality, sacred songs, South Asian performing traditions, mystical traditions, caste, gender, and sexuality. Bala trained for over twenty years in traditional vocal music, including a two-year-long immersive discipleship with South Indian Classical musician Dr.R.Vedavalli and poet-saint Kabir’s philosophy and songs from Shri.Prahlad Tipaniya. With over ten years of interdisciplinary performance experience, he attempts to re-imagine the many ways of looking at traditional music from India, centering the marginalized experience at the intersection of song, immigration, race, gender, personal narrative, transnational experience, and performance.